@maz As i am too a one man artist in my studio i keep things tight, this discussion has led me to the thought of perhaps changing my local SSD of my flame to exactly what finn and chris mentioned. Ill use my server to store my project, ill use my 1gbt NAS to make a copy of current project if i need to share my project to another facility via dropbox and synDrive. That is working really well, now i should also make a Syndrive link to my SSD from my server so my current project lives on my SSD as a superfast cacheā¦ So no more flame caching as its reading directly from the SSD local. the sync copies it to my ubuntu server that has the largest capacity. then to the NAS if needed for offsite sync. I like it! and then the upgrade costs would be for faster speeds. currently i have fiber between my flame and server and my bottleneck is the server RAID. but thats totally doable and functional. All this Syncing is all automatic, and is way cleaner than ācachingā on the flame the project which takes a long time if i have large exrs and then the archiving can be instantaneous, and further more ill have 3 copies of my project. Ill have to look into absolute paths or whatever so i dont run into issues if i open my project down the track from my server instead of my SSD if i need to do a little tweakā¦
Im really thinking of the current hardware that i have right now and how best to utilise it so forgive me if theres a way better way to set this up from scratch but this is what i have now. Ubuntu PC that is my server -18Tb ( bunch of 7200rpm drives nothing fancy), a linux flame with 12TB SSD cards hardware raid internal. and then i have a slow Synology that frankly ive been using only for photo/video/surveillance system for years. I have one client that loves dropbox and he has a server at his office that i need to sync my project to. So as i was having a hard time with dropbox on ubuntu lately ( it never synced and i had to pause and unpause all the time) i started using Drive ShareSync between my synology and my ubuntu server. What im thinking of doing is syncing it to my SSD flame as well and not cache anymore.
So ill effectively have my project sitting on my internal storage in flame continually being backed up to server, and if i need it off into the world of dropbox i can sync that too but that part is not necessary. RSync to backup once a night for instance or if i can get Sharesync to work on a non synology machine like rocky ( i need to research that bit)
This could be amazing for loading shots and accessing media all uncached now, and also archiving. no need to include media anymore and fast as hell.
If you continuously update your project once a mth lets say i would have an offline project repository on your larger server side, maybe just date your project folders and be a good housekeeper so you keep your project small and nimble at all times, offline unsused or older timelines/shots to a non synced project folder. and keep backing that up and offloading it as much as you can. Your archive sizes of 14Tb seems to be super large even for 1hr shows? all depends of compression of course/file formats etc.
I wouldnāt go proxy, it used to be problematic and changed the way masks worked and was generally more buggy than useful. perhaps its better. i dont think thats the way to go.
another way to keep sizes down is to always consolidate larger media filesā¦ never have massive 2000 frame clips laying around if you are using 48frames of it. Consolidate and write them out to your current project would keep sizes down considerably on longer form jobs.
Good file management and investing in the read/write speed between flame and storage is key
If you get a storage solution that is as fast as you need, then you dont even need any local storageā¦ you have this and some fiber and your done. easy. no sync, no muss no fuss.
i was waging exactly that 12 bay nvme qnap with 25gbit against lucid.
i have never seen flame perform as fast as with lucid ona local cache, not even with 40gbit fibrechannel to a ssd SAN.
local storage will always win against any network storage in āraw speedā for my part i am juggleing timelines like a madmen and cached nothing in flame which feels great 